1. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it CASTOR Operational experiences HEPiX Taiwan Oct. 2008 Miguel Coelho dos Santos

2. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Summary CASTOR Setup at CERN Recent activities Operations Current Issues Future upgrades and activities 2

3. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it CASTOR Setup at CERN Some numbers regarding the CASTOR HSM system at CERN. Production setup 3 5 tape robots, 120 drives 35K tape cartridges, 21 PB 900 disk servers, 28K disks, 5 PB 108M files in name space, 13M copies on disk 15PB of data on tape castorns castorcentral tapeservers castoralice castoratlas castorcms castorlhcb castorpublic castorcernt3 srm

4. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it CASTORNS setup 4 3.00GHz Xeon, 2 CPU, 4GB ram

5. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it CASTORCENTRAL setup 5 3.00GHz Xeon, 2 CPU, 4GB ram

6. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Instance setup (cernt3) 6 CPU E5410 @ 2.33GHz, 8 cores, 16G

7. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it On High-Availability High-available setup achieved by running more than one daemon of each kind Strong preference for Active-Active setups, i.e. load-balancing servers using DNS Remaining single points of failure: –vdqm –dlfserver –rtcpclientd –mighunter Deployment of CERNT3 model to other production instances depends on deployment of new SRM version 7

8. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Recent activities CCRC-08 was a successful test Introducing data services piquet and debugging alarm lists Ongoing cosmic data taking Created REPACK instance –Needed a separate instance to exercise repack at larger scale –Problems are still being found and fixed Created CERNT3 instance (local analysis) –New monitoring (daemons and service) –Running 2.1.8 and new xroot redirector –Improved HA deployment 8

9. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it CCRC-08 Large number of files moved through the system Performance (speed, time to tape, etc) and reliability met targets => Tier-0 works OK SRM was the most problematic component: SRMserver deadlock (no HA possible), DB contention, gcWeight, crashes. 9

10. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Current data activity No accelerator... still there is data moving Disk Layer Tape Layer 10

11. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Data Services piquet In preparation for data taking, besides making the service more resilient to failures (HA deployment), the Service Manager on Duty rota was extended for 24/7 coverage of critical data services => Data Services Piquet The Services covered are: CASTOR, SRM, FTS and LFC. Manpower goes up to increase coverage but: Improve documentation Make admin Processes more robust (and formal) The number of admins that can do changes goes up The average service specific experience of admins doing changes goes down

12. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Operations Some processes have been reviewed recently Change management –Application upgrades –OS upgrade –Configuration change or emergencies Procedure documentation DISCLAIMER ITIL covers extensively some of these topics. The following slides are a summary of a few of our internal processes. They originate from day to day experience, some ITIL guidelines are followed but as ITIL points out, implementation depends heavily on specific environment. Our processes might not apply to other organizations. 12

13. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Change Management (I) Application Upgrades, for example to deploy castor patch 2.1.7-19 Follow simple rules –Exercise the upgrade on pre-production setup, identical as possible to production setup –Document the upgrade procedure –Reduce concurrent changes –Announce with enough lead-time, O(days) –“No upgrades on Friday” –Don’t upgrade multiple production setups at the same time 13

14. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Change Management (II) OS Upgrades Monthly OS upgrade, 5K servers –Test machines are incrementally upgraded every day –Test is frozen into Pre-production setup All relevant (specially mission critical) services should (must!) have a pre-prod instance, castorpps for CASTOR –1 week to verify mission critical services internal verification –1 week to verify the rest of the services external verification (several clients, for example voboxes) –Changes to production are deployed on a Monday ( D-day ) –D-day is widely announced since D-19 (=7+7+5) days 14

15. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Change Management (III) Change requests by customer –Handled case by case –It is generally a documented, exercised, standard change => low risk Emergency changes –Service already degraded –Not change management but incident management! Starting to work on measuring change management success (and failures) in order to keep on improving the process 15

16. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Procedure documentation Document day-to-day operations Procedure writer (expert) Procedure executer –Implementing service changes –Handling service incidents Executer validates procedure each time it executes it successfully, otherwise the expert is called and the procedure updated Simple/Standard incidents are now being handled by recently arrived team member without any special CASTOR experience 16

17. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Current Issues (I) File access contention –LSF scheduling is not scaling as initially expected –Most disk movers are memory intensive: gridftp, rfio, root. –So far xrootd (scala) seems more scalable and redirector should be faster Hardware replacement –A lot of disk server movement (retirements+arrivals). Moving data is very hard. Need drain disk server tools. File corruption –Not common but happened recently that a raid array started to go bad without alarm from fabric monitoring –Some files on disk were corrupted. –Need to calculate and verify checksum of every file on every access. –2.1.7 has basic RFIO only check summing on file creation (update bug to be fixed, removes checksum) –No checksum on replicas –2.1.8 has replica checksum and checksum before PUT 17

18. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Current issues (II) Hotspots –Description Without any hardware/software failure, users are not able to access some files on disk within acceptable time –Causes 1.Mover contention 2.File location Not enough resources (memory) on disk server to start more movers. Problem is specially relevant in gridftp and rfio transfers. xroot should solve it for local access. Grid access needs to be addressed. Although more movers can be started on the disk server, other disk server resources are being starved, for example network or disk IO. Can be caused by: 1.Multiple high speed accesses to the same file (few hot files) 2.Multiple high speed accesses to different files (various hot files) There is currently no way to relocate hot files or to cope with peaks by temporarily having more copies of hot files. 18

19. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Current issues (III) Small files –Small files expose overheads, i.e. initiating/finishing transfers, seeking, meta data writing (for example tape labels, catalogue entries and POSIX information on disk (xfs)) –Currently tape label writing seems to be the biggest issue... –More monitoring should be put in place to understand better the various contributions from the different overheads Monitoring –Current monitoring paradigm relies on parsing log messages  –CASTOR would benefit from metric data collection at daemon level 19

20. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Future upgrades Upgrade FTS –It will allow to start using internal gridftp! (lower memory footprint) Upgrade SRM –A lot of instabilities in recent versions    –Getting SRM stable is critical –It will allow to run load balanced stagers everywhere! 2.1.8 –New xrootd –Complete file check summing –Etc (see talk by S. Ponce) Monitoring –New fabric monitoring sensor and more lemon metrics are in the pipeline 20

21. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Future activities Data taking Local analysis support Disk server retirements –~65 disk servers to retire 1Q 2009 –More throughout the year 21

22. CERN - IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Questions?